Don't be fooled, there are real differences

If you've been following the media's coverage of this election, you'll be aware of the laments about how shallow and spin-driven it all is.

The opinion pages are full of this sentiment. Today in Fairfax, Lindy Edwards calls it "one of the most cynical elections in years". Also in Fairfax, Rodney Tiffen suggests that voters just want life to be simple, arguing that the two major party campaigns are "based on catering to, and fuelling, the cynical disengagement of overloaded swinging voters." Over at The Australian, Janet Albrechtson cites research by Sally Young that suggests that "between 12 per cent and 17 per cent of Australians say they're so bored by politics, they would prefer not to vote."

Even those outside the media are chiming in: La Trobe University's Daniel Bray argues that "this election campaign will go down as one of the most dreary in Australian history."

I've been guilty of this cynicism myself. Last week here at the ABC's Unleashed, I tried to unpack the intellectual trends underlying this increasingly media-centric campaign, pointing to the greater role of imagery and symbolism in politics, as in other aspects of our society, since the 1960s."When substantive policies are thin on the ground," I wrote, "when great moral challenges are cause for delay and procrastination, and when even the audience at a campaign debate can be accused of being biased, it's not surprising that the most insightful political analysis comes from a panel of ad-men."

But there are real differences between the policy platforms of the two major parties who can form a government after Saturday. Let's examine some of them.

Top of the list is surely broadband. Labor will build a high-tech, costly, future-proofed National Broadband Network, laying fibre into the homes of nine-tenths of Australian households. The Coalition will throw $6 billion at backhaul infrastructure and hope that wireless plugs the gaps. As Paul Kelly rightly observed yesterday, "the broadband gulf between Labor and Coalition is immense. This idea mocks the notion of a modest campaign".

The NBN is a massive investment that will shape Labor's next term in office, should it win this Saturday. It's a remarkably ambitious piece of infrastructure which will demand superb project-management skills from NBN boss Mike Quigley and his responsible minister, Stephen Conroy. The $43 billion project will require perhaps $26 billion of public expenditure, and the potential for IT glitches, costly delays and budget blow-outs is nearly boundless. And that's even before you get into the difficulties of censoring the internet.

In contrast, the Coalition is offering a far more constrained, cost-effective and slower plan for building broadband infrastructure. It will be much more affordable, but it will only deliver speeds to around the same levels many of us can get right now on a decent ADSL2+ plan. Unsurprisingly, it's a policy that has been roundly criticised by many prominent analysts, and it offers one of the clearest points of difference between the major parties.

Media coverage of the NBN has been patchy, but there have been some notably cogent analyses. Mark Pesce, writing here on the ABC, put the Liberal policy to the sword on the basis of nothing more than high-school physics:

If [Andrew Robb and Tony Smith] did their maths, they'd come to understand and accept that fibre-to-the-premises is inevitably a part of the Australian future. There's no way that any other combination of technologies - whether copper or cable or wireless - can handle the endless demand for increasing levels of connectivity which is the singular and inescapable fact of 21st-century life ... In the future-proofing sweepstakes, there is only one winner: fibre.

Writing in Business Spectator, prominent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde also lampooned the Coalition's policy arguing that "If the Opposition had a good understanding of the issues then they could have mounted a far more effective campaign against the government's broadband plans." Budde makes a point few have so far picked up on, which is that the Coalition has also promised to abandon the Government's e-health and computers-in-schools initiatives: "in effect, they are taking away the key policies that would have seen private investments moving towards the NBN."

But there is a sense in which the debate over the National Broadband Network reveals a larger philosophical difference between the two major parties. Put simply, it is this: the Labor Party still believes in building public infrastructure. The Liberal Party doesn't.

This visceral opposition to government spending on infrastructure surely underlies the Liberal Party's vicious campaign against the second part of the Rudd Government's stimulus package. Few political parties have cleaved to outdated ideas about the danger of government debt and deficit like the Liberal Party of Australia.

Belief is the operative word here. As everyone from Glenn Stevens to a group of 50 leading economists have argued, Australia doesn't have a government debt problem. That hasn't phased Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey. And that belief has flowed over into a general dislike of government investment - even useful and effective government investment, for instance in our nation's primary schools.

When you don't believe the money should be spent in the first place, it's easy to believe that it's all just rorts and wastage. Hence, two separate inquiries that have found Julia Gillard's schools stimulus program to be generally well-managed and cost-effective haven't changed anyone's minds.

As big issues go, it doesn't get any bigger than the question of whether the government has a role to play in intervening in the economy to invest in the future well-being of ordinary Australians. The current economic situation in the United States, where policy-makers no longer possess the political capital necessary to push through a second round of stimulus spending, looks set to doom the US to 10 per cent unemployment and ongoing economic stagnation, perhaps for years. In the UK, it's even worse: savage cuts to government spending are creating real risks of a double-dip British recession.

But the question of the government's role in the economy goes beyond Keynesian stimulus spending in downturns. This nation faces all sorts of big challenges and looming crises that simply cannot be solved by private investment or market forces acting alone. Michael Pascoe makes the sensible point today that, given the demographic and economic challenges facing Australia, taxes will have to rise in the medium term. Recent ABS figures show that inflation in the health and education sectors is running at 5 and 5.7 per cent respectively. As Kevin Rudd told anyone who was listening, at this rate state governments will have their entire budgets eaten up by hospitals spending within a generation.

Someone has to pay for these rising costs. Taxpayers will almost certainly have to share the pain. This is why the "great, big, new tax" scare run by Tony Abbott is inherently dishonest.

Looming over the horizon, the issue of climate change continues to haunt the Australian polity. Neither major party wants to take it seriously. Nor do the Australian media. But the science gets firmer every record-breaking month. Eventually, citizens will become so afraid of the consequences of rapid warming that they will demand action from politicians. At that point, "direct action" really will become direct and active.

The investments required to decarbonise and climate-proof Australia's economy and society will be immense. The government will, almost by definition, have to play the leading role. Even if we want capital markets and the private sector to play a significant role, we will need to change the rules of the marketplace to give investors appropriate incentives to do so. In other words, we will need to create a price for carbon.

Here, too, there are massive differences between the two major parties. Under Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party appears fundamentally opposed to a price on carbon, despite the sound free-market principles of user-pays economics which support it. Under Julia Gillard, this Labor Government has certainly run a long way backwards from its former commitment to a carbon price through an emissions trading scheme. But there is at least no ideological or philosophical objection.

If you think, as I do, that climate change is the most important policy challenge facing this nation, then this may be the most important policy difference between the major parties. Julia Gillard at least accepts the scientific evidence of a warming world. Tony Abbott still has genuine difficulties with this science. Gillard has pledged to work to "build a consensus" on creating a price on carbon. Abbott has unequivocally stated that "there will be no carbon price on consumers under a Coalition government, none whatsoever."

Of course, if you really want action on climate change, you'll probably vote Green in this election. But the fact remains that the gulf between Labor and Liberal on climate is yawning.

Hence, if you consider the Labor and Liberal positions on just the key issues of climate change, the broadband network, the stimulus and the role of government in the economy - and there are of course others - it is simply wrong to conclude, as Mark Latham has, that "when it comes to good ideas for Australia's future, Gillard and Abbott have given the voters a blank piece of paper."

There are real and hugely important differences between the major parties' positions. That's a fact worth remembering when you cast your ballot this Saturday.